Pat Gelsinger, VMware CEOBangalore: It’s an open secret that enterprise software vendors around the world compete extremely hard against each other to crack customer deals.

And in doing so, they would go all out to vow CIOs and IT decision-makers (ITDMs), trying to claim how their technology product or service is superior to the competition in terms of benefits and the cost.

However, according to VMware’s CEO Pat Gelsinger, these CIOs and ITDMs want their vendors to cooperate rather than compete with each other over technology and services.

“CIOs want cooperation from their vendors, they want them to be more cooperative in terms of technology support and services,” Gelsinger said at a recent media briefing.

What Gelsinger has mentioned actually resonate to the current industry trend of hybrid IT and multi-vendor environment that most enterprises are adopting as part of their IT organization and strategy. And most CIOs today want an open and heterogeneous IT environment without any vendor lock-ins, flexibility and interoperability.

In fact, his comment also clearly reflected in the alliance strategy that VMware has pursued in a big way in recent times.

Interestingly, company’s alliance strategy is built on its core technology vision of VMware Cloud Foundation and VMware Cross-Cloud Architecture – all focused around cloud, specifically dealing with multiple clouds, its connectivity and manageability, security and other challenges.

VMware last month announced a key partnership with public cloud player Amazon Web Services (AWS) to provide hybrid cloud service to customers. Going ahead this engagement according to industry experts is most likely to cause some real discomfort to other cloud players like Microsoft and Google.

Surprisingly, VMware and AWS were actually long-time rivals and competed against each other until Gelsinger and Andy Jassy, CEO – AWS recently decided to turn their business rivalry into a strategic business tie-up.

From CIO and enterprise perspective, this partnership perfectly matched today’s hybrid IT needs of any organization whether it is private cloud using VMware’s virtualization and cloud technology for core business or leveraging AWS public cloud in a hybrid environment – all working together at the same time.

Like AWS, VMware also has partnership with IBM SoftLayer for cloud and infrastructure services. Similarly, Dell too has a global technology alliance with VMware for cloud and infrastructure.

Besides, the Palo Alto based company has built a strong security alliance with security vendors like Palo Alto Networks, Symantec, Trend Micro, Check Point and others for provide advanced threat protect in virtualized environments. In fact, experts have strongly recommended a multi-vendor IT environment approach for enterprises in a bid to minimise and mitigate security risks.

In Gelsinger’s view, partnerships with different technology players would enable enterprises and CIOs to meet their IT requirements and leverage technology in a comprehensive way.